August 31, 2015

I wasn’t grateful. You want to talk cranky, coitus interruptus takes me well beyond cranky. My engorged labia felt like they were pressing on my brain — what there was of my brain — and if I didn’t get to fuck someone, something, now — a vampire would do — I was going to fucking explode. My cunt ached like a bruise. Beyond cranky, rather fortunately, doesn’t transmute into embarrassment. It transmutes into fury. As my blood pressure began to rearrange itself to a more standard unengorged pattern I was seething.

August 31, 2015

ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

August 31, 2015

You stop on the top wet step and nearly slip
and all day catch flashes of that header from the hedge
onto black tarmac – skull reshattered by the driver
shouting no – and what they’d say back home: how you
climbed a milestone thinking it was a stile, not used
to charting your way from maps alone, consulting
a New York City novelty uptown/downtown
compass to navigate the ancient lanes of Penwith
plus a booklet of walks to pagan sites with occult
tips. And how they’d find a scrap of newsprint in the
front pocket of your daypack about a man who
jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge a second time.

Helen Sandler

Helen Sandler is poet, writer, editor, publisher and event organiser. She publishes new books by women under the Tollington Press imprint. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in magazines and journals including DIVA, Smoke, Brand and Chroma, to name but a few. Her website may be found HERE.

Remorse-she has none for romance what motives then?
her face a gatling gun of mirrors taking in adulatory gazes
like bullets to fire back their own naivety
reflecting the depths
of their sacrifice along every inch
of trajectory.
She so brassy shell; loaded & cocked to snip mien.

blanked by statements in exclamation marks.
black frame sentence in white gilt.
played out to insane piano.
an entire ethos feagued in a decade to foreclose.

from slim, pallid Cigarette smouldering
she will go east as emollient Salome
igniting w. a dance of the seven veils
men compelled to throw
their hair to her fire.

Divine precursor to feminist desire (or feminine paregoric)
taking hold where it hurt the most
even before most knew where that was
& what they’d lost
Was something not in the can
Theodosia’s ‘arab death’ became theirs too.